People aren’t keeping their gadgets, appliances, and other gizmos as long as they used to. That’s according to researchers from the Öko-Institut in Germany, which was asked to examine the rate at which consumers replace their electronics products with new units. People replace consumer electronics for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s because a product stopped working; other times it’s because consumers want the newest version of that product. Both reasons are becoming increasingly prevalent. As the Guardian

Crowdfunding platforms are chock-full of people exaggerating their own abilities or making their products seem like they can do things outside the realm of possibility. Artiphon’s attempt to raise funds for its “Instrument 1″ does neither of those things. I know this because I, along with several hundred other people, saw a prototype of the Instrument 1 used by a member of Moon Taxi during last year’s Southland festival in Nashville, hosted by Pando. (Insert boilerplate about this…

President Obama wants China to know that the United States government is the only one that can ask Western tech companies to include backdoors in their consumer products. Obama told Reuters that China’s mandates “would essentially force all foreign companies, including U.S. companies, to turn over to the Chinese government mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those services.” That, obviously, would be bad. But the most telling part of the interview came…

Most of the things revealed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona aren’t worth getting too excited about. For example, how many people are really going to be using any of the payment platforms introduced during the conference, or buying the expensive-but-“secure” devices, or paying even the slightest attention to talk about Google’s wireless network or Facebook’s drones? But there is at least one thing worth paying attention to: Qualcomm’s fingerprint scanner. The new scanner uses “ultrasonic sound technology”…

It’s hard for teenagers to buy cigarettes. Most stores are required to check someone’s ID before selling them any tobacco products, and new driver’s licenses are getting harder to fake. Barring help from someone who can legally buy them — which seems disturbingly easy to get, unfortunately — many teenagers won’t be getting cigarettes any time soon. A new study in North Carolina, the heart of tobacco country, shows that it isn’t nearly as difficult for teens to buy…

Venmo isn’t responding to criticism of its security practices as well as some might like. Its security was questioned last week when Slate revealed that it doesn’t inform users when their passwords are changed, nor when new email accounts are connected to existing Venmo accounts, which allowed one thief to make off with about $2,850 of a Venmo user’s money. The service usually informs its users when money has been transferred. In addition to adding a new email address…

Supporters of the so-called Islamic State have called for attacks on Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and other Twitter employees as retribution for shuttering its propaganda accounts. BuzzFeed was the first to translate the threat from its original Arabic. It reads, in part: You started this failed war … We told you from the beginning it’s not your war, but you didn’t get it and kept closing our accounts on Twitter, but we always come back. But when our lions…

Facebook might not allow drag queens or Native Americans to use their real names on its service, but it looks like the company isn’t totally insensitive to its users’ various cultures. The company revealed yesterday that it will no longer define genders via the drop-down list that appeared whenever someone made or updated their Facebook profile information. Instead, the service will now allow users to input whatever gender they like, and to choose which pronoun…

Dick Costolo wasn’t kidding when he said Twitter would better handle abuse in the future. The company has introduced new features — one which allows its users to report when others are posting their personal information and another which requires trolls to verify their phone numbers or email addresses with the service — to address its harassment problem. The first feature might have the most immediate impact. Sharing personal information about someone is a common…